The NextWomen Food & Fashion Theme.

Last month, a well-known British department
had a promotion/deal/short sale on its very well-known and much-loved underwear.
Regardless of existing price or multi-buy discount, THIS WEEK ONLY they were
offering a further tantalising 20% off.

Along with a sizeable sector of the
knicker-buying nation, I hot-footed it into the nearest branch and made my way
past the food section (and therefore also the chocolate mini-bites) up to Lingerie.
Having bypassed some suspiciously inexpensive bras, I happened upon the
perennial range of £5 each or 3-for-a-tenner stretch lace ‘boy shorts’. With
the 20% discount applied, this was a wallet-soothing 3-for-£8 and therefore
almost irresistible.

Note the ‘almost’. Something about it made
me stop and think. This was three pairs of knickers for just over £2.60 each,
RETAIL price, for sale in the UK. I think it unlikely that the shop in question
was running a loss leader, so this being the case, how much did they cost to
produce?

It didn’t take an awful lot of approximate maths to work out that
someone, somewhere, was earning very little making very large numbers of
knickers so that we, the pants-purchasing British public could have a full
underwear drawer.

Of course, it’s not just knickers that are
the problem. Think of the sheer quantity of clothing that’s available today and
the relatively little they cost. Compare with twenty-five years ago and how
there were just two sales a year, at the start of which a mad dash would ensue
with practically everything gone within a week. Think of now with the endless
racks of cheap, unpleasant, wear-once clothing lining the rails in the outlet
or sale shops. Please don’t think I’m being snobbish. I’m not. This is not
about only buying pricey garb. It’s about buying well-made, realistically priced,
good stuff that lasts. You know: the kind of thing that still looks great in
three or more years’ time and hasn’t exploited someone in the process. The same
applies to food. If as a nation we really understood what to do with a chicken
or a vegetable, we wouldn’t need to have mass-produced excesses of food, much
of which gets consigned to the bin anyway.

Following my knickers near-miss, I found
that a mere 40 miles due south, someone had already cottoned onto the issue
quite some time previously. OK, so this is a bit of a white lie. I already knew
about Becky John having met her some months earlier, so I looked her up and
what I found both intrigued me and fired me enthusiasm. Determined to bring the
story to The NextWomen readership, I sent a tweet and by return received Becky’s
agreement for an interview.

Becky founded and continues to run a workers
cooperative called Who Made Your Pants? The clue is in the name. Driven by a
love of beautiful underwear and a loathing of sweat shops, she decided to launch
a business in her current home town of Southampton with the clearly stated aim
of empowering marginalised women through training, education and work.

Becky’s workforce is made up of refugees,
typically from Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan where prevailing conditions can
be a daily threat to personal safety.

Arriving here with little or no grounding
in the UK language and culture, these women are at a high risk of becoming
completely isolated with no chance of integration and socialisation.

Who Made
Your Pants? aims to deliver something different. By understanding and
acknowledging the social and cultural needs of their workforce, they create the
opportunity for the women to fulfil the demands of family life whilst also
coming to work. There, the women spend time with each other, learn valuable
skills and make beautiful, first rate, designer knickers of which anyone would
be rightly proud.

Becky and I agree that I will visit the
office/factory to look round and we arrange a day and time where I will
coincide with a visit from Katharina, who owns and runs Audrey und Fred, a
designer underwear shop in Germany, and is here on a buying trip. When I
arrive, it’s not a production day, so I don’t meet any of the seamstresses, but
Becky introduces me to Della, the operations manager who arrived as a volunteer
in 2009, made herself indispensable and is still there to this day.

Once through the door, I am immediately struck
by the feel of the place. There’s a vibe about it, in no way diminished by the clothes lines of pants strung up in lieu of interior decorating.

It’s a jolly
sight and I am cheered by the prospect of pants in the boardroom, gaily draped
like slightly saucy bunting.

I comment on this and Becky takes the opportunity
to talk me through the evolution of their design. The early prototypes, she
tells me, were ‘hard to love’ and to be honest I can see why. Though pretty,
they are hardly practical and look like they might end up where they ought not
to be. The problem was that they were designed by a clothing designer and the
breakthrough came with the arrival of a bona fide lingerie designer. It is, I
learn, a completely different art and the result is a dazzling array of
gorgeous, stretch-lace short-type knickers that never ride up, refuse to roll
down and even stay put when put through the wringer of a Zumba class.

One of the steepest learning curves for
Becky was in discovering the practical needs of her workforce. The women arrive
with a completely different attitude to work.

Compared to family and children,
it’s often way down the list of priorities so in order to fulfil its purpose,
the business has to have flexibility as a built-in concept. The women are all
on zero-hours contracts – the contract is positioned as vitally important and
is taken very seriously – so that they can then build their hours around what’s
possible. Regular working is rewarded with a permanent contract and a share in
the business. News of this is spreading fast and Becky now has a waiting list
of 60 women wanting jobs. Another core concept that needed to be taught was
that of accuracy. For many, ‘almost right’ was perfectly fine – which clearly
caused problems when it came to the finer points of sizing!

As well as providing employment, Who Made
Your Pants? is a business that serves other vital purposes.

Here, the women
come to understand that they can have control over their lives, when all they
may have previously known is having things done to, for and around them.

There
is free access to the Internet for personal use and to information that might
not be easily available elsewhere. The building is set up so that there are no
issues around mixed-sex integration, meaning that male visitors can be on site
without coming into contact with the workforce. For the job to be accessible to
the women, this too can be essential.

Katharina arrives and we get talking. The
knickers are really popular with her clients and she is looking for a range of
colours and sizes to take away. This is not a problem. A handful of outlets
notwithstanding, most sales currently come through the web meaning that the
team have made up a good number of each size in each colour, all ready to go.
We enter the stockroom and I am mesmerised. Katharina is admiring but
business-like, musing on the likely popularity of Pirate Pink, whilst I just gaze,
misty-eyed. Upon enquiring about the price variance across the range I am told
that pricing is determined by how complex a particular fabric is to work with
and hence how time-consuming. Here’s the other great thing: all the pants are
made from up-cycled fabrics – that is, stretch lace acquired from the major
lingerie firms when there is too little left to be worthwhile for them but a
perfect quantity for a short run by Who Made Your Pants? It really is a
win-win, with customers knowing that whatever they’re buying is truly a limited
edition. What’s more, every pair is individually cut, stitched and
hand-finished. One of the seamstresses has a brilliant eye for detail and makes
sure every pair going into stock is perfect.

Becky’s focus now is on building the
profile of the business and generating sales. Happily, she is a born saleswoman
and could charm the socks off just about anyone with her particular mix of
passion, energy and focus. Shortly before my visit, there had been a flurry of
media interest resulting in a pleasing spike in turnover. Now, that just needs
to build and maintain.

In the time it takes Katharina to select
upwards of 75 pairs of knickers, I finally settle on my two favourites.

‘The
80’s’ is a wonderful aubergine lace with a gold shimmer, ‘Welsh Green’ is an
almost teal-like shade with, delightfully, a bright scarlet gusset and - unlike
with three-for-a-tenner - I know who made them. What’s not to love?

Hatty’ Richmond's professional background is in management consultancy, specialising in organisational development and design. She has a particular interest in the role of leadership in determining culture and the resulting impact on performance.

Alongside her consulting work, Hatty writes both fiction and non-fiction including articles, profiles and short stories – the latter mainly for fun. Her novel, On the Outside, is based on a true story and is due for completion in early 2013.

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The NextWomen is a community of Investors, Entrepreneurs & Advisers. We build formats to support the growth of female entrepreneurs -from
startups to companies making millions. We provide access to capital, resources and networks,
offering our community a support infrastructure critical for success. Join the community too! - See more at: http://www.thenextwomen.com/about-us/contributors#sthash.9GODHllB.dpuf

The NextWomen is a community of Investors, Entrepreneurs & Advisers. We build formats to support the growth of female entrepreneurs -from
startups to companies making millions. We provide access to capital, resources and networks,
offering our community a support infrastructure critical for success. Join the community too! - See more at: http://www.thenextwomen.com/membership/sign-up#sthash.0ApND3BW.dpuf

The NextWomen is
a community of Investors, Entrepreneurs & Advisers. We
build formats to support the growth of female entrepreneurs -from startups to
companies making millions. We provide access to capital, resources and
networks, offering our community a support infrastructure critical for success.